Homeschooling

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Series: Why You Should Care About Common Core Standards

You have probably heard of Common Core Standards, which are now being implemented in public schools all across this nation. You might not have. They kind of snuck up on us, unless you were paying attention to national education policy, and a lot of us are kind of busy with other stuff. But the spotlight has recently been directed on these new federal curriculum mandates by the likes of Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Shane Vander Hart, and Diane Ravitch. I am dumbfounded. I am (almost) speechless. I am angry. If you are a believer in liberty, individualism, and the unique abilities and needs of children, then you will hate them too. I will start posting some of the information I discover here, but I encourage you to do some reading up on this. Doesn't matter if you have kids in public school, private school or home school; kids are all grown; don't have kids. This is huge, invasive, and will effect EVERYTHING about the country we live in and its future.

Why I oppose Common Core standards: Ravitch

Education
historian Diane Ravitch, the leading voice in the movement opposing
corporate-based school reform, has for several years said she has no
definitive opinion on the Common Core State Standards. Now she has come out against them, in this post, which appeared today on her blog.
This is the third Common Core post I am publishing today.
By Diane Ravitch
I have thought long and hard about the Common Core State Standards.
I have decided that I cannot support them. In this post, I will explain why.
I have long advocated for voluntary national standards, believing
that it would be helpful to states and districts to have general
guidelines about what students should know and be able to do as they
progress through school. Such standards, I believe, should be voluntary,
not imposed by the federal government; before implemented widely, they
should be thoroughly tested to see how they work in real classrooms; and
they should be free of any mandates that tell teachers how to teach
because there are many ways to be a good teacher, not just one.
I envision standards not as a demand for compliance by teachers, but
as an aspiration defining what states and districts are expected to do.
They should serve as a promise that schools will provide all students
the opportunity and resources to learn reading and mathematics, the
sciences, the arts, history, literature, civics, geography, and physical
education, taught by well-qualified teachers, in schools led by
experienced and competent educators.
​For the past two years, I have steadfastly insisted that I was
neither for nor against the Common Core standards. I was agnostic. I
wanted to see how they worked in practice. I wanted to know, based on
evidence, whether or not they improve education and whether they reduce
or increase the achievement gaps among different racial and ethnic
groups.
After much deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t
wait five or ten years to find out whether test scores go up or down,
whether or not schools improve, and whether the kids now far behind are
worse off than they are today.
I have come to the conclusion that the Common Core standards effort
is fundamentally flawed by the process with which they have been foisted
upon the nation.
The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the
District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on
the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea
how they will affect students, teachers, or schools. We are a nation of
guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.
Maybe the standards will be great. Maybe they will be a disaster.
Maybe they will improve achievement. Maybe they will widen the
achievement gaps between haves and have-nots. Maybe they will cause the
children who now struggle to give up altogether. Would the Federal Drug
Administration approve the use of a drug with no trials, no concern for
possible harm or unintended consequences?
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan often say that
the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily
adopted by them. This is not true. They were developed by an
organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, both
of which were generously funded by the Gates Foundation. There was
minimal public engagement in the development of the Common Core.
Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from the
states. ​In fact, it was well understood by states that they would not
be eligible for Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they
adopted the Common Core standards. Federal law prohibits the U.S.
Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but in this
case the Department figured out a clever way to evade the letter of the
law. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia signed on, not
because the Common Core standards were better than their own, but
because they wanted a share of the federal cash. In some cases, the
Common Core standards really were better than the state standards, but
in Massachusetts, for example, the state standards were superior and
well tested but were ditched anyway and replaced with the Common Core.
The former Texas state commissioner of education, Robert Scott, has stated for the record that he was urged to adopt the Common Core standards before they were written.
The flap over fiction vs. informational text
further undermined my confidence in the standards. There is no reason
for national standards to tell teachers what percentage of their time
should be devoted to literature or information. Both can develop the
ability to think critically. The claim that the writers of the standards
picked their arbitrary ratios because NAEP has similar ratios makes no
sense. NAEP gives specifications to test-developers, not to classroom
teachers.
I must say too that it was offensive when Joel Klein and Condoleeza
Rice issued a report declaring that our nation’s public schools were so
terrible that they were a “very grave threat to our national security.”
Their antidote to this allegedly desperate situation: the untried Common
Core standards plus charters and vouchers.
Another reason I question the Common Core standards is that I am
worried that they will cause a precipitous decline in test scores, based
on arbitrary cut scores, and this will have a disparate impact on
students who are English language learners, students with disabilities,
and students who are poor and low-performing. A principal in the
Mid-West told me that his school piloted the Common Core assessments and
the failure rate rocketed upwards, especially among the students with
the highest needs. He said the exams looked like AP exams and were
beyond the reach of many students.
When Kentucky piloted the Common Core, proficiency rates dropped by
30 percent. The Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents has already
warned that the state should expect a sharp drop in test scores. What is
the purpose of raising the bar so high that many more students fail?
Rick Hess opined that reformers
were confident that the Common Core would cause so much dissatisfaction
among suburban parents that they would flee their public schools and
embrace the reformers’ ideas (charters and vouchers). Rick was
appropriately doubtful that suburban parents could be frightened so
easily.
Jeb Bush, at a conference of business leaders, confidently predicted
that the high failure rates sure to be caused by Common Core would
bring about “a rude awakening.” Why so much glee at the prospect of
higher failure rates?. I recently asked a friend who is a strong
supporter of the standards why he was so confident that the standards
would succeed, absent any real-world validation. His answer: “People I
trust say so.” That’s not good enough for me.
Now that David Coleman,
the co-lead author of the Common Core standards, has become president
of the College Board, we can expect that the SAT will be aligned to the
standards. No one will escape their reach, whether they attend public or
private school.
Is there not something unseemly about placing the fate and the future of American education in the hands of one man?
I hope for the sake of the nation that the Common Core standards are
great and wonderful. I wish they were voluntary, not mandatory. I wish
we knew more about how they will affect our most vulnerable students.
But since I do not know the answer to any of the questions that trouble
me, I cannot support the Common Core standards.
I will continue to watch and listen. While I cannot support the
Common Core standards, I will remain open to new evidence. If the
standards help kids, I will say so. If they hurt them, I will say so. I
will listen to their advocates and to their critics. I will encourage my
allies to think critically about the standards, to pay attention to how
they affect students, and to insist, at least, that they do no harm.

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About Me

I am a Christian wife and homeschool mom of 5, living near Raleigh, North Carolina. I've been married to my best friend for 35 years. All of my children have graduated from our homeschool, and the youngest will soon leave for college, making me an "empty nester" after 32 years of mommyhood and 23 years of homeschooling. I enjoy spending time with my family, visiting with friends, baking cupcakes, being creative, reading, snuggling babies, mentoring, writing, and encouraging others in their homeschooling journey.